Chatting with Barrhaven transit riders and relaying those concerns to OC Transpo

I chatted with many of our Barrhaven transit riders this week at several platforms, and as such I also was able to represent many of those issues at transit commission on Thursday. Key issues that came out this week have been:

1. The city has commissioned a report from Mott MacDonald that will consolidate the technical analyses of Alstom and RTG on the 2021 derailment root cause. This is an important issue as this will translate to the OC Transpo long-term rail fixes for the Confederation line. What this means to you is that we will be able to transition from an interim model of extreme mitigations to actual hardware and procedural fixes to make your Line 1 trips safer and more effective. See link.

2. I addressed the overdue need to sort out the St. Mother Teresa busing situation and OC Transpo has indicated this is a priority. They received the request from OSTA after OC Transpo’s fall resourcing plan was completed and this has caused the delay. Their analysis is that an additional five buses need to be sourced to address this deficit. After raising this issue privately and today at committee, staff have committed to me that getting to a solution is a priority (see link) Once they give me a solid date I will push that out right away on social media and my newsletter.

3. I spoke to the New Ways to Bus impacts for Barrhaven residents – specifically, how we will get folks to the Limebank station and back, and also how we can mitigate the overpacked 75 buses and bring the 275s online. While the majority of the new routes from New Ways to Bus will not come online until April, staff have committed that the 99 and 74 bus routes will be initiated on the same day that the Trillium line opens. This will provide immediate access for Barrhaven residents to the LRT. This is great news as we won’t need to wait until the Spring to take advantage of this new line. See link.

4. Given the procurement challenges with the new E-buses, I directed staff to look into and report back to transit commission on options for the procurement of diesel buses as an interim step to complement the E-bus procurement in the short-mid term. My focus is that we place transit riders at the center of the equation and the procurement process needs to complement your needs, not the other way around.

5. Thanks to all the folks that came to chat with me throughout the week either at the platform or on the bus. Please reach out to me - either in person or through email or phone – if you have concerns or issues or if you just want to chat. It was through this that I met up with Barrhaven resident Peter Szperling, a CTV news reporter, who challenged me to a race downtown – him in his car and me on the bus…. Check out the results of that here!

6. I also had a really good chat with Kristy Cameron from CFRA where we discussed many of these issues and in particular the importance of OC Transpo not overlooking the bussing needs for Barrhaven residents. You can hear that conversation here (my conversation with Kristi starts at 19:00).

Councillor Lo and I have both had a number of engagements over the past several weeks regarding the sprung shelters. If you are not aware of this issue or want more information, please see this link that has Councillor Lo and my latest updates on this issue as well as several media reports and stakeholder comments. The bottom line is that we have continued the work with the mayor, city staff and key stakeholders to address the original assumptions in the staff report – in this case, no news is good news as it means that staff are considering our position and this is the only mechanism to see a favourable outcome. As much as we all want to know the outcome now, I would ask you to give me a few more weeks as I anticipate that we will receive new information within the month. I will remain stalwart in my efforts to best represent you throughout. Reach out to me if you have any specific questions or concerns and I would be happy to discuss further.